Kimberley Snow offers an outrageously funny and honest account of her adventures as head cook at a Tibetan Buddhist retreat center. With her earthy sensibility and sharp sense of humor, the author shows this world in a light devoid of preciousness—while expressing with heart the integrity of the spiritual work being undertaken. We come away from our visit to this exotic realm having found it both extraordinary and surprisingly familiar. The neuroses, obsessions, and petty concerns exposed by Snow—both in herself and her fellow staff members—prove to be grist for the mill for discovering the grace inherent in life just as it is.

Chapter 3:
Nina, the Evil Kitchen Elf
Dorje Ling, staffed mainly by volunteer workers who received food, lodging, and retreat time, also supported two wards. These were basically charity cases, usually people who were unable to function well or were not responsible enough to be volunteers but had been taken in for one reason or another.

I was not sure how Nina, a bone-thin Eastern European psychotic, and her brother Jorg arrived at Dorje Ling. In order to test everyone's patience, I assumed. The rumor was that they were "referred" by a retreat center teacher in Oregon who'd had enough of them for one lifetime. Sometimes the Tibetan lamas would send each other their very worst students that way; maybe it happened in Tibet as well, I don't know.

Jorg, a mechanic, was more than welcome. One of the lamas had a habit of going around to the local auctions and buying up whatever he thought the center could eventually use. As a result, these heaps of broken machinery dotted the grounds—everything from a backhoe to a rock crusher. Even a bad mechanic would have been welcomed, so the highly skilled Jorg seemed an answer to prayer. But he came with his little sister Nina. She'd spent ten years living on the streets in Berlin, dealing heroin, turning tricks, and who knows what else. She'd been in and out of rehab, diagnosed as schizophrenic, as manic-depressive, as sociopathic, as having multiple personalities. You name it, she'd worn the label. Now she was a ward at the center.

The kitchen staff could usually work up sympathy for all of Nina's suffering, but no one liked her personally because she was just plain mean. With her frizzy hair, wild eyes, and sudden, sharp movements, she looked a little like Frankenstein's bride and gave off a kind of electric-shock energy that permeated any room she entered. Even when I was working hard at the stove, I could always tell when Nina came into the kitchen.

Partly because the energy changed to something red and jagged and partly because Nina loved to stand at the fluorescent light switch and flip it on and off, on and off, on and off until someone made her stop.

Aversion, they say, like anger and attachment, creates karma. If so, I'm probably tied to Nina for countless lifetimes because I'd never encountered anyone for whom I'd developed more aversion more quickly. And Nina enjoyed my irritation, fed on my discomfort, rattled my cage whenever possible.

Our other ward at the time, a local woman named Mathilde, suffered from a similar background of drugs and mental illness. She had a habit of taking off her clothes and walking around the grounds naked shouting antigovernment slogans, but usually, if you just gave Mathilde food or made sure she was taking her medication, she'd calm down, even help with the dishes.

But Nina wasn't so easy to handle. She enjoyed playing the evil elf of the kitchen: switching labels on the spices, turning the oven dial to 5000, putting a cupful of salt in the sugar bin, hiding the meat thermometer, the tops to the plastic bins, whatever we needed most. Then she'd blame what she'd done on someone else.

After one infuriating day when we made her leave the kitchen, she told her brother Jorg that I wasn't being nice to her, and he went to Lama Tashi.
"She crazy, you not," the Lama said to the assembled kitchen staff. The bottom line at Dorje Ling was that everyone had to get along.

"But, Lama Tashi, how can we fix lunch for sixty-five people when she's all over the kitchen getting into everything?"

"Good practice for bardo," he calmly proclaimed. The bardo after death and before another rebirth is often filled with wrathful deities, terrifying sights, loud noises. Tibetans teach that the chance for attaining enlightenment in this bardo state is high if you can maintain a steady mind. "Very good practice."

"What studying?" he asked us sternly in his funny English. Certainly not Buddhism, he told the kitchen staff—Buddhism developed compassion for every living being. We hung our heads. All of us had seen the entire shrine room brought to a halt while an ant or some other insect was taken outside so as not to be harmed. But ants are tiny and mind their own business, I thought bitterly, resentful at being treated like a naughty child.

He said we should thank Nina for showing us the limits of our patience. Most of us hadn't developed what he called large patience, an ease of mind that could see the world like an old man on a park bench watching children at play. At most, he said, we practiced restraint, and while that was better than anger, it still wasn't large patience. Some of us hadn't even learned restraint.

"But Lama Tashi—" I almost said that I was tired of being jacked around by that bad-news piece of Euro-trash, but stopped just in time, "I have a job to do. In a place this size I have to plan ahead, to have things organized, under control. Just yesterday I came into the kitchen to cook lasagna and she's drying her boots in the oven and won't take them out. What chef in her right mind can work under these conditions?" Oh, I was right, I was righteous, but even as I talked I could see how many times "I" and "my" snuck into my speech, how much of my own suffering came from wanting control. Just before Lama Tashi shooed us all back to the kitchen, he turned to me disdainfully. "No compassion having."

They say that a guru is like a fire: if you stay too far away, you can't feel the warmth, but come too close and you get burned. Definitely singed. They also say that a guru is a mirror, reflecting your own habits and patterns back to you until you are able to break them. Despite my hurt feelings and outrage, I couldn't help remembering how many times I'd grandly dismissed someone with just such a preemptive remark.

Nocompassion having became my secret mantra, a constant rhythm in my head interrupting me whenever I was just about to launch myself. Reminding me to be fair when on the verge of correcting someone. Niggling at me when I packed aggression into a witty remark. Chasing me in my dreams. Casting a glaring light over a host of memories, urging me to review the patterns that kept me isolated in anger and judgment.

I dream I'm traveling across a familiar barren landscape.
I've dreamed of this place often in recent months, walking, walking through its isolation, never arriving. This time the dream begins to change. Its sepia tones turn bluish white, the light harsh against frozen waste. For the first time I realize that the rocks that edge the dream-plain are made of ice. The mountains in the distance are glaciers, wind howling around everywhere shot with motes of snow. Then I wake inside the dream, alert that I'm still dreaming, aware of immense cold and loneliness. In the distance I hear the wrenching sound of ice breaking. As I begin to walk toward that terrible sound, I enter the dream again, losing a sense of being an awake witness. Something appears on the landscape: a ship, fitted out with an icebreaker, its giant jaws grabbing at the solidly packed white landmass, then crushing and grinding it into churning ice gravel. Lama Tashi stands at the helm bearing down on me.